Feature Spotlight: User Roles

One of the most important features that all Trackops customers should understand is the concept of user roles. User roles in Trackops provide the pillars for access control throughout the application, and keeping them up to date makes managing permissions a breeze. This month, we turn the feature spotlight on user roles to better understand what they are and how to properly implement them in any organization.

#####**User Roles Are Not Access Levels**

A common misconception is that user role are somehow directly based on a user’s access level. For that, we have detailed the definition of access levels, and have distinguished the difference between access levels and user roles. To summarize, it's a good idea to think of user roles as pre-defined groups of permissions; they simply control what a user can or cannot do. Access levels, on the other hand, control the amount of access that a permission provides to the user, but only IF they have that permission enabled in their user role.

User Roles are Really Job Functions

When customizing user roles, it’s usually a good idea to think about them in terms of the jobs that your employees actually perform. For example, you may have Junior Investigators who don’t have as much responsibility as Senior Investigators. It makes perfect sense to create separate roles for each of these jobs, because even though the job titles are similar, they will likely require separate permissions. In addition, when you add a new investigator to your team, you can quickly assign them the permissions they need by choosing the role that best fits their job description.

Clone Existing Roles to Quickly Create New Roles

Did you know that you can clone an existing user role to create a new role? The difference between one user role and another is often times only one or two permissions, so don’t start from scratch when you can start with a similar role that’s already pre-configured. You’ll save time, eliminate mistakes, and increase consistency when creating new roles.